Third witness to Maguindanao massacre killed

The
climate of impunity that fostered the November 23, 2009, massacre of 57
people, including 32 journalists, is alive and well not only on the southern
Philippines island of Mindanao, where the massacre took place, but in all of
the country. The revelation that the brutalized body of a key witness to the
killings, Esmail Enog, was found two months after he had gone missing is an
indicator of that. Enog testified last year that he had driven gunmen to the
site of the November massacre, news reports said. The killings wiped out almost
an entire generation of journalists in the region.

According to Nena Santos, a
prosecutor in the case, Enog's body was mutilated and dismembered before he was
killed, apparently in March, The New York
Timesreported.
He is the third witness to have been killed since the trial began in 2010.
Santos said Enog refused to participate in the government's witness protection
program because he did not want to be separated from his family, according to The
Associated Press.

Enog was an important
witness: He had been a driver for the Ampatuan family--the political clan that
controlled the area as a personal fiefdom for years, with its own private
militia. In July 2011, he told the court hearing the case in a secure setting
in Manila that he had driven 36 Ampatuan militiamen from one of the clan's homes
to the site where the 57 victims were shot, almost all at close range.

As Shawn Crispin, CPJ's senior Southeast Asia representative,
reported,
relatives of witnesses have also reported being attacked, threatened, offered
bribes, and harassed. Enog's brutal death is part of a larger legal paralysis.
In the years since the Maguindanao massacre, Crispin wrote:

The fight for justice has
simultaneously intensified in rhetoric and bogged down in technicalities. Legal
stalling tactics, a fractured prosecution, and slow-moving courts have
conspired against a speedy trial. Despite the case's high international profile
and pronouncements by President Benigno Aquino that justice would be swiftly
served, the Maguindanao prosecution has conformed to a disturbingly familiar
pattern for media killings in the Philippines: A journalist is killed; local
law enforcement officials are lax or complicit; witnesses and complainants are
intimidated, bribed, or attacked; the defense employs stalling tactics to break
the will and resources of victims' families; the case goes unsolved and the
culture of impunity is reinforced.

The slow progress has raised doubts about the Aquino
administration's ability to achieve justice. On the first anniversary of the
killings, Aquino said the resolution of the cases would be a "litmus test"
of the country's justice system. But without a strong executive push the
complex case looks likely to stretch out for a decade or more.

It is wrong to believe that just
because the Maguindanao killings have been so widely reported, that either
the provincial or central government in this case will be able to muster the
political will and the prosecutorial energy to not only bring the men who
pulled the triggers to justice, but also the powerful figures who ordered them
to do so.

Since the Maguindanao killings, CPJ has recorded the death
of four more journalists who were killed for their work, and another seven murders
in which we have not been able to clearly determine a motive. In virtually all
of those cases there has been little more than an inconclusive, cursory
investigation, with few cases getting beyond the short-term arrests of low-level
suspects. The Philippines ranks third on CPJ's global Impunity
Index, slightly better than Iraq and Somalia. Aquino vowed both before and
after his election to
achieve swift justice in the Maguindanao case. Well into his six-year term, it
does not look like he will be able to deliver on those promises.

Bob Dietz, coordinator of CPJ’s Asia Program, has reported across the continent for news outlets such as CNN and Asiaweek. He has led numerous CPJ missions, including ones to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Follow him on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.

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